[Dr_Emann]

Of course. There should never be more than one way to do something in c, even if it makes things easier or less error prone. This is why the -> operator would never be included in c. You can already use (*x).y, it would be SILLY to introduce a whole operator which isn't orthogonal to all existing features of the language.

[ludocode]

I never said C's language features are orthogonal. I said they should be. C is far from a perfect language, as your example shows.

Look at it from the opposite direction: if x->y didn't exist today, and the billions of lines of existing C code all used (*x).y, would you support a proposal to add a new x->y operator to the language? I doubt it.

[Dr_Emann]

I would absolutely support something to replace ((((a).b).c).d).e with a->b->c->d->e, regardless of how much code had been written without that feature.

Do you not like the array subscript operator, either, since a[b] can be *(a+b)? How about a && b, you can replace that with (!!a) & (!!b), with an extra 'if' if you need the short circuiting.